Report: Two Google searches could boil a kettle

by Stevie Smith - Jan 12 2009, 13:00

If, as an eco-conscious consumer, monitoring and controlling your carbon footprint is something you’re truly committed to, then you may be somewhat shocked to learn that two casual searches through the Google engine rival the energy required to boil a kettle.

That’s the estimate offered up by American research specialist Gartner, which claims that a single Google search generates around 7g of carbon dioxide, while boiling a kettle of water requires somewhere in the region of 15g.

According to Gartner, the single search’s CO2 level is amassed by the power demands of the host computer and also by the Google request being routed through giant data centres that consume massive amounts of power.

Gartner’s CO2 figures for Google use fall within similar approximations made by the likes of UK environmental service carbonfootprint.com (between 1g and 10g) and Chris Goodall, author of Ten Technologies to Save the Planet (between 7g and 10g).

According to The Telegraph, a spokesperson for Google has insisted that the service is “among the most efficient of all Internet search providers.”

Reaching beyond the carbon dioxide effects attributed to Google, Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross, a Harvard University physicist heading research into the environmental demands of IT, notes that basic Web browsing results in the creation of 0.02g of CO2 for every second the user remains on any given site.

“Websites are provided by servers and are viewed by visitors’ computers that are connected via networks,” writes Dr. Wissner-Gross. “These servers, clients and networks all require electricity in order to run, electricity that is largely generated by burning fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas.”

Dr. Wissner-Gross also points out that Web sites utilising advanced video require up to 0.2g of CO2 per second.

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